Aden Young

Daniel Holden comes home from nineteen years on death row in Rectify (2013) and lies down on his boyhood bed, and Aden Young presses his face into the pillow as if he has never met one. That is the performance in miniature. Young plays Daniel as a man who has learned to take up no room: he finishes every sentence, because he has had two decades to think them through, and he stands still because standing still is what prison taught him. It moved us more than a man lying face down ought to, and the reason is that Young plays it as a first meeting, not a homecoming. Ray McKinnon built the series so that the smallest thing Daniel does registers, and Young repaid him for four seasons without once reaching for effect.

He had been at it for more than twenty years before most people noticed. Born in Toronto, he made his debut at eighteen in Bruce Beresford's Black Robe (1991), then spent the 1990s and 2000s largely in Australian cinema, in Metal Skin (1994), where he played a character called Psycho Joe, and Mao's Last Dancer (2009) among others, and worked twice in all with Beresford. He chose small films and independent ones, and the choice kept him out of view. Rectify changed that, and he has said as much: it pulled him back into acting.

What he does is hard to describe because so little of it is visible. He shows what a man is thinking without saying it, and he can hold a silence long past the point where most actors would fill it. The parts that suit him are men whose past is doing the talking: the wrongly, or possibly rightly, convicted; the damaged; the ones who have to be watched rather than listened to. Don't Tell (2017), an Australian drama drawn from a true legal case, is in that vein. So, on the face of it, is Detective Henry Graff in Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent (2024–), which takes him back to Canadian television.

That is also the caveat. His reputation is tied to Daniel Holden closely enough that everything since is read as more of the same, and the stillness that was a discovery in 2013 could harden into a habit if the roles keep asking for it. He knows what he is doing with a character. "On the last day of every character I’ve ever played," he has said, "I lay the clothes out on the floor with the shoes and socks, so that it looks like the character has literally vanished." We would like, once, to see a director make him move quickly and say too much. We suspect he could.